Glad you enjoyed it!
Not to add to your expenses, but definitely invest in some "sleep phones." I like the Took's brand, and it's the cheapest. You can lay completely on your side and the wafer-thin speakers don't bother you at all. Pretty decent sound quality too.
Sleep-phones are unfortunately essential to get the most out of the session, especially as an insomniac. (to be clear, I have no affiliation with any headphone brand)
I'm a lifelong, severe insomniac. Have restless leg too, though minor in my case. It was a major frustration for 11 years that I couldn't truly help my own insomnia with the audio stuff I was doing. There were protocols others had used/recommended, but they were pretty limited in their effectiveness. I kept experimenting with things, testing mostly on myself. The real breakthrough came when we perfected our use of HRTF ("3D" audio).
My problem was mostly sleep-onset insomnia, and this enabled me to create an interesting, constantly-moving 3D scene that was able to dissociate me from my daily worries and chattery mind. If you notice, the sounds rotate around your head. Our neuroscientist Giovanni Santostasi hypothesizes that one of the reasons the thing works so well is because it mimics the effect of rocking in a cradle or a hammock, since the ears do somewhat have to do with balance (he mentioned a study in which they analyzed the effects of rocking and it enhanced the quality of sleep from an EEG perspective - can ask him for it if you want).
After that it was a matter of finding relaxing ways to implement the stimulation. Giovanni is an expert on what's called slow-wave sleep. It's the deepest stage of sleep, and is where memory is largely consolidated. His work at Northwestern is almost exclusively developing audio stimulation to enhance slow-wave sleep. They recently got a ridiculous large grant from DARPA for it. Look him up if you're interested.
So, after some talk, I created a protocol to stimulate slow waves that also ended up involving the 3D audio.
It took some tweaking, lots and lots of testing, but the end results were... staggering. Frankly unbelievable.
The first time Giovanni did a sleep study on me with this new protocol, he thought I had faked the EEG data somehow, and I don't blame him. It was frankly more likely that I had somehow generated fake EEG-like microvolts for 8 hours than get the result that we did. Then he tried it on himself and got nearly the same result, which was a surprise because he can sleep standing up if he's tired enough.
What he saw on the EEG was that the sleep protocol enhances slow-wave oscillations by 20-30%. To put this in perspective, if you decide to pull and all-nighter tonight, tomorrow when you sleep, you'll see a slow-wave gain of only about 10% to compensate.
It's an insane result. Absolutely ridiculous.
But the thing is, the result is clear as day if you do a sleep study. We confirmed and confirmed and confirmed it. Take a look at the sleep study analysis on the website. I know it's hard to parse - we need to convert it into non-giovanni-speak. But look at those correlations, and how consistent the result of the stimulation is between subjects...
Not only this, but we're showing an increase in what are called Spindles, which are highly associated with memory consolidation. It's very likely that we are also increasing memory consolidation with this, in the same way that his department at NW is showing that using a phase-lock-loop auditory stimulus enhances memory consolidation.
I know you didn't ask any of this, it's probably boring. I'm just very passionate about sleep. Have a lot more to say about it in general but will stop here :)
To sum it up: What I'm getting at is that even if you weren't an insomniac, you can still very much benefit from using the sleep sessions!
AND I will bet you that if you get some special headphones that allow more freedom, it will help you get to sleep as well.
Please keep me updated. Message me or find me on brain.fm. Would love to be updated on your progress. Tell you what, if you commit to getting some sleep-phones, I'll give you the price of the headphone's worth of free Brain.fm time to test this out. I'm just curious now, and love helping a fellow insomniac. :)
- Adam from Brain.fm